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A Cruise on the S.S. Brainstorm

While college students bask, the ship’s thinking-class passengers problem-solve in the background.Credit
Ben Sklar for The New York Times

ABOARD MV EXPLORER — Somewhere on the Mediterranean, a robot was taking shape.

But it wasn’t in a lab. César Harada and Gabriella Levine, whiz kids from opposite sides of the globe, were crammed under the stairwell of this decommissioned cruise ship, hunched over bins of batteries and wires.

Nor did it look like a robot. Five feet long and shaped like a skeletal eel, the Protei is a waterborne drone Mr. Harada invented to clean up oil spills. The 30-year-old French-Japanese inventor held it up. “Generation 10.5,” he said, looking on the verge of exhaustion. He and Ms. Levine, 28, had only three days left to fine-tune their idea into a functioning prototype. “I don’t think I’ve slept more than three hours” she said of the preceding two weeks.

On the pool deck, fresher 20-somethings braided one another’s hair, while Silicon Valley titans discussed user-interface design. Off the stern, the Strait of Gibraltar receded into the distance.

Welcome to Unreasonable at Sea, a four-month-voyage that aimed to combine the shipboard campus of Semester at Sea with the entrepreneurial zeal of globalized markets and the do-gooder communal spirit of a hackathon.

Even the organizers knew it sounded far-fetched (hence the name). For 100 days, the founders of 11 start-ups sailed the world, joined by a rotating cast of corporate bigwigs and mentors that included Jeff Hoffman, a former chief executive of a Priceline company; Prince Fahad bin Faisal Al Saud, a member of the Saudi royal family, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

Also on board, for sex appeal: 630 college students, who cracked open their textbooks while tanning poolside. Pushing off from San Diego in January, the voyage headed west, stopping every week or so in exotic ports like Kobe, Japan, and Port Louis, Mauritius, before ending in Barcelona, Spain. A film crew documented the entire voyage.

If TED talks and Google Labs copulated and spawned a cruise for the Facebook generation, Unreasonable at Sea would be the result.

Among the first to sign up was George Kembel, a founder of the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford, known as the d.school, the influential graduate program that teaches creative thinking. “The pitch was, do you want to be a part of this learning experience about what it takes to take innovation global?” said Mr. Kembel, who brought his wife and three young sons on the voyage.

The software giants Microsoft and SAP each paid six figures to secure cabins for their executives, eager for access to fertile minds. The college students were marshaled by the University of Virginia, through its Semester at Sea study-abroad program.

And at the helm was Daniel Epstein, 27, the founder of a Colorado tech boot camp called the Unreasonable Institute, and now Unreasonable At Sea: a serial entrepreneur with a softy side. “We’re all huggers here,” he said, introducing a reporter and photographer around for a weeklong stay for the last leg, between Casablanca, Morocco, and Barcelona.

Any sense that this would be a “Real World”-style adventure (“11 start-ups, picked to live on a boat ... ”) was dashed by the nerdy industriousness of the companies, the lack of free-flowing alcohol (carry-on booze was strictly policed by ship staff) and the frequent admonitions that entrepreneurs not hook up with undergrads. Socializing mostly took place at mealtime, and included daylong stints of Mafia, the parlor game.

“I live here,” said Mr. Harada, in the airless classroom where the entrepreneurs spent their days. “I have no home. I’ve been crossing international borders every two weeks for two years.” Though he and Ms. Levine have illustrious resumes (he, a TED fellow who studied design in London and worked at M.I.T.; she, a cancer researcher, interactive designer and wildland firefighter), neither was a trained robotics engineer, much less a boat-builder. They tussled over finding the right spring-loaded clamps and batteries.

They financed Protei with a $100,000 grant from the Ocean Exchange. But for Ms. Levine, who gave up lucrative work to focus on Mr. Harada’s invention, worries about money and creative fulfillment were top of mind. “I’m not quite where I want to be, professionally,” she fretted in a team-building exercise.

A pleasure cruise this was not. Entrepreneurs well past their college years found themselves pulling all-nighters, hampered by spotty Wi-Fi signals. They hoarded cereal and bought Cup Noodles from the ship’s canteen at midnight, spending as little time as possible in the windowless cabins where they were doubled up, sometimes in bunk beds.

Privacy was at a premium. In addition to the documentary team, which posted online updates throughout the trip, a French television crew followed Mr. Harada and Ms. Levine. The pair stood out by taking an open-source approach to their work, rather than seeking patents, much to the consternation of the profit-minded executives onboard.

“Some mentors even called us communists,” Mr. Harada said later. “I’m coming from the new world, and many of the mentors, with all due respect, they are coming from the old world.”

“Today,” he added, “what creates wealth is what you share, not what you hide.”

In the daily workshops, young executives bonded over their shared sense of social entrepreneurship. “Passion” and “community,” not “monetize,” were the words of choice.

“We believe empathy is what builds empires,” Mr. Epstein recited.

In addition to Protei, there were companies focused on turning carbon emissions into building materials and plants into water filters. Each start-up onboard had been vetted by Mr. Epstein and his team in a process that resembled a college application. Once chosen, they still had to run their international businesses from the ship.

“I’ve never worked so hard in my life,” said Mouhsine Serrar, a mechanical engineering Ph.D. and the founder of Prakti, which manufactures low-cost portable cooking stoves for the developing world.

On the other hand, mentors, who mostly came aboard in short spurts, found the journey refreshing. “It was my ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ professionally,” said Prince Fahad, 30, a Saudi royal who runs two high-tech start-ups from San Francisco. He boarded the ship in Cape Town, and disembarked a week later in Ghana.

The close quarters did make for some unusual connections. “I’ve totally high-fived Archbishop Desmond Tutu,” said Kevin Moore, the ship’s technologist-in-residence.

For the students, who took courses on travel writing and oceanography and partied in port, the Unreasonable crew was a fraternity unto themselves, huddled with their laptops in the cafeteria. Even after final exams, when students passed their time playing cards and lifting weights on the pool deck, there was not much interaction, though a few dozen did become Unreasonable acolytes.

With an assist from Mr. Epstein, Mr. Kembel taught a popular class on creative thinking, using the Unreasonable companies as case studies. On graduation day in the student union, Mr. Kembel handed out Stanford d.School pins — a symbol, he said, of membership in its exclusive society of “wayward thinkers.” As the students linked arms and teared up, Mr. Epstein suggested that, like him, they cement their devotion by getting tattooed with the Unreasonable logo: a light bulb with wings. At least five eventually took him up on it.

Wade Colburn, a college junior from California majoring in biomedical engineering, wasn’t one of them, but he joined this Semester at Sea program mainly because of Unreasonable. “You can do something that’s for, like, the better of the world and still make a profit,” he said. “That was a huge shift in my thinking.”

After 100 days, 25,000 nautical miles, 11 countries and 3 continents, the Explorer arrived in its final port, Barcelona, on April 25. “Breakfast from 0630 to 0730 ONLY,” came the e-mail from the ever-chipper Unreasonable coordinator. “It’s O.K., you’ll be too excited to sleep anyway.”

It was a gray, drizzly morning, and the students, still dazed from their final-night festivities, lugged their new African- and Indian-print bags down the gangway, said goodbye to friends and reunited with parents eagerly lined up past security at the Port of Barcelona terminal.

The entrepreneurs, too, slowly gathered their belongings and made their way to a nearby hostel, with yet more bunk beds. They had only a few hours of free time before another round of pitches and meet-and-greets. That evening, they were saluted at a fancy party at the maritime museum, with local leaders praising their 21st-century gumption.

Mr. Harada and Ms. Levine, meanwhile, were testing their final biomorphic prototype for production in Hong Kong. Hours after the boat docked, they rushed to Parc de la Ciutadella, Barcelona’s central park, with a couple of equally high-achieving international friends from M.I.T. and Apple. The French TV crew hovered as they made adjustments to the shape-shifting hull. Mr. Harada attached tiny weights, acquired at a toy store in Kochi, India; Ms. Levine spent an hour fixing a royal-blue sail.

Under a driving rain, with ducks and rowboats floating nearby, they launched Protei in the park’s green pond. Standing under a tree with the remote control, Mr. Harada directed the white vessel into the depths: it glided nearly silently through the water, making graceful, slithery turns.

Their friends, having never seen Protei fully in action before, jumped up and down and cheered, but Mr. Harada and Ms. Levine remained Zen. They had felt all along that their wild idea would work.

Correction: October 6, 2013

An article last Sunday about Unreasonable at Sea, a four-month cruise that brought together the founders of tech start-ups, college students and corporate mentors, misidentified one of the companies whose representatives accompanied César Harada and Gabriella Levine, two inventors, on a shore excursion in Barcelona, Spain. It is Apple, not Google.

A version of this article appears in print on September 29, 2013, on page ST1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Cruise on the S.S. Brainstorm. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe